U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Crabb is interviewed in her chambers at the federal courthouse in Madison.

U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb, the daughter and granddaughter of lawyers, says she dreamed of becoming a judge while she was growing up in Chicago. She keeps plush toy crabs and wooden toys on a coffee table in her chambers.

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Michael Sears

U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb, the daughter and granddaughter of lawyers, says she dreamed of becoming a judge while she was growing up in Chicago. She keeps plush toy crabs and wooden toys on a coffee table in her chambers.

Madison — Her father and grandfather were lawyers. So was a favored uncle. And as a schoolgirl in suburban Chicago, she really did dream of one day becoming a judge.

"After I found out what it involved, I said, 'Oh, that just doesn't happen to people,'" said U.S. District Judge Barbara Crabb.

Crabb's modesty belies her outsized impact on life in Wisconsin.

From gambling to fishing, abortion to marriage, Crabb has issued many important and controversial rulings during her decades on the bench. She is now on senior status and since January has handled around half the caseload she long shouldered through her career.

In June, Crabb overturned Wisconsin's constitutional ban on gay marriage, opening the way for more than 500 same-sex couples to marry. She then put her ruling on hold as state officials mounted an appeal. Some have criticized her for leaving a legal path to those marriages through the device of announcing a decision without immediately addressing whether to stay her ruling.

Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen had asked Crabb to block gay marriages while he appealed her decision.

"To me, this is really a manufactured controversy that was unfortunately aided a little bit by Judge Crabb's lack of willingness to provide clarity," Van Hollen said during an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last month when asked about the same-sex weddings that were then taking place.

With the case now fast-tracked to an appeals court, Crabb declined to discuss the specifics of those rulings.

Yet her legal writing speaks volumes.

In striking down the ban, Crabb said, "Quite simply, this case is about liberty and equality, the two cornerstones of the rights protected by the United States Constitution."

She issued the stay with mixed emotions.

"After seeing the expressions of joy on the faces of so many newly wedded couples featured in media reports, I find it difficult to impose a stay on the event that is responsible for eliciting that emotion, even if the stay is only temporary," she said in the order.

During an interview in her office, Crabb talked about her life and career, reflecting on key cases and personalities. She was dressed in an elegant dark suit with a deep pink blouse set off by a pearl necklace and earrings. Rimless glasses and short silver hair framed her face. She laughed with ease.

Plush soft toy crabs and wooden toys sat on a coffee table with legal books stacked on her desk.

Crabb is 75, with two grown children and two grandchildren. She and her husband, Ted, have been married for 55 years. He retired in 2001 after working for 33 years as director of the Wisconsin Union at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Crabb has been a trailblazer, attending law school at a time when the profession was dominated by men. She recalled that she was the only female graduate during the midyear graduation at UW-Madison Law School in 1962.

When then-President Jimmy Carter appointed her, Crabb became the first female federal judge in Wisconsin. In those days, Senate confirmation for district judge was more of a formality than a tug-of-war like today and she was confirmed on a voice vote.

Her path to the bench was helped by U.S. District Judge James E. Doyle Sr., who hired Crabb as the court's first federal magistrate in 1971. It was a part-time position. Crabb's first office was a desk in a library at the old federal courthouse in Madison. In 1974, she became a full-time magistrate.

"We were on the second floor of the Post Office," she said. "We had terrible, terrible facilities. In the summertime we had to open the fuse box because flames would come out of it otherwise. The air conditioning made too much noise to use it when the trial was in process."

Former Gov. Jim Doyle said his father saw in Crabb a lawyer and a person who "had it all."

"She is very, very smart, very thoughtful," Doyle said. "She's very fair, very analytic in how she thinks about things. She knows this is about human beings and real things that happen in their lives. She is a person with a good heart."

Crabb said Judge Doyle "was one of the most amazing people. He was not just kind but he had an ability to look at people from the inside and look out through their eyes. ... He was absolutely committed to seeing that life was as fair and as just to everyone who came in front of him."

Crabb said she did not just learn from Judge Doyle, but also from U.S. District Judge John C. Shabaz, a prickly conservative legislator who was appointed by then-President Ronald Reagan. Crabb and Shabaz were ideologically and temperamentally opposites. But they got along extremely well.

"Judge Shabaz believed in fair treatment for people. He was such a hard worker, you couldn't help but be impressed," she said.

Crabb said the route she took to the bench at that time was not so unusual. Although, there was a bit of a twist. When the newly created judgeship came open, Crabb said then-U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson had someone in mind to appoint. But then-U.S. Sen. William Proxmire had announced he wanted to create a judicial selection commission to fill vacancies.

"When he announced the commission, it was very difficult for Sen. Nelson to say, 'Oh, I can't do that because I have my own guy that I want in office.'"

Crabb said she found out about the commission by reading a news story in the Milwaukee Journal on the day she and her husband were filling in on their son's paper route.

From the outset of her career on the bench, Crabb struck a conciliatory tone. At her swearing in, she said judges have "an arduous and lonely voyage ... one whose course and destination are unknowable until the end."

She added that judges decide cases "which will not only change the course of history, but may determine whether that history will continue."

In one of her major rulings, Crabb helped bring to an end years of litigation over Chippewa treaty rights. She affirmed the tribe retained special hunting, fishing and gathering rights negotiated in 19th-century treaties with the U.S. government.

"What Crabb did, in a nutshell, was divide resources in the northern third of the state 50-50 between the Chippewa tribe and non-Indians," the Milwaukee Journal wrote.

She called the case "one of the most challenging and rewarding. It went on and on ... OK, these resources have to be shared. What role does the state play in deciding? We took timber, deer, fish. Fish were the single-most contentious. I had no idea how the people of Wisconsin cared."

Protests erupted. Crabb spelled out the limits for those protesting the rights of the tribes to spearfish. Hate mail piled up in her office, she recalled. She even received what she called "a terrific little poster" that said: "Save A Walleye. Spear A Crabb."

In a 1991 case, Crabb helped pave the way for Indian tribes to conduct casino gambling. The state lost the appeal on procedural grounds.

"The whole idea, once the state operated a lottery that was the reason why I could do it," she said. "That's what the U.S. Supreme Court made clear. You look at what the state is doing and you can't say the Indians have less rights."

Crabb said she doesn't gamble but recalled with a smile that her mother loved playing poker.

"I think it has been very good for some of the tribes. It has its problems. It's not a panacea for anything," she said.

In 1997, despite her own "misgivings," Crabb let stand major parts of a state law that required women to wait 24 hours before getting an abortion. The U.S. Court of Appeals reversed her on some issues. The law, passed in 1996, went into effect in 1998.

Asked about cases in which she might have to put personal preferences aside and rule strictly on the law, she said, "That's the nature of the game."

In 2010, Crabb declared the National Day of Prayer unconstitutional, provoking national outrage. The decision was overturned by a federal appeals court.

Asked in a joking way what her thinking was in issuing that ruling, Crabb laughed softly and said, "I was thinking that the government shouldn't be in the business of sponsoring, promoting religion. Obviously, people disagreed."

Crabb lamented some of the difficulties she has seen in the legal system over the course of her career.

"Just being here and watching the criminal caseload, the expansion, the change in the kinds of cases that are brought," she said. "We used to have one U.S. attorney and one or two assistants, now we have a whole fleet of them. We have a whole fleet of probation officers."

"When I started out, I would say a 10-year sentence was almost unheard of," she added. "Then we got the war on drugs, just the whole idea that the way to make the country safe was to put everyone in prison. Sentencing guidelines, mandatory minimums. It has been a very discouraging thing to watch."

"I think most of the judges I know feel the same way," she added. "Here we are just putting these people into prison. I think we knew it was really, really hard on the prisoner and the prisoner's family. But I don't think we anticipated what we're seeing now, which is, this has torn those neighborhoods. There are no men in lots of neighborhoods for kids to even relate to. Now maybe all those men weren't doing the best things in the world with their time, but we just denuded those neighborhoods of men in the prime of their lives."

Despite her reservations on harsh sentencing, Crabb remained upbeat about the legal system and impassioned about the law.

Asked how long she expected to serve as a judge, Crabb said, without skipping a beat, "'Til it's not fun."